


Any Other Night

by mustntgetmy



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, Marauders' Era, R/S Games 2015, Sirius Black in Azkaban, Smoking gillyweed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-23
Updated: 2016-08-23
Packaged: 2018-08-10 15:18:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7850158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mustntgetmy/pseuds/mustntgetmy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In 1977, Remus and Sirius set about trying to kill the moon, and years later, in Azkaban, Sirius reflects on this and on his damaged relationship with Remus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Any Other Night

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2015 RS Games.  
> The line of poetry Sirius alters comes from "The Freedom of the Moon" by Robert Frost.

_Hogwarts, 1977_

They bought some gillyweed off Mundungus Fletcher one morning in early October and smoked it that night in the Astronomy Tower. It was quality, like he promised. Potent as hell. One toke sent the stars spinning in the horizon, two made the moon – nearly full – go from bright white to molten silver and the third almost made it blur away entirely. Almost.

“D’ya hate it?”

Query from the left, where the telescopes stood in a row, all pointed in different directions. Sirius’d turned a few of them down to face the ground before he’d lain below them, symptom of his absentminded tendency toward mischief.

Any other night, any other moment, any other state of mind and the answer is no, of course not. The moon is not responsible for what I am. It’s an allergen, an unfortunately unavoidable trigger. It is not the disease, it is not the teeth that bit me. It’s just a rock, reflecting light, as subservient to its nature as I am.

But tonight is tonight and this moment is this moment and the gillyweed has clutched Remus by the nape of his neck, it has dulled everything but that light, that awful white light.

“Yeah,” he says, his voice steady because it’s a steady thing, this hate. Because the moon is always there in the sky, its eye closing and then opening again so it can watch him tear himself into a new body and back again. It seems a simple conclusion now, with the gillyweed darkening his peripheral thoughts, that if the moon were gone he wouldn’t have to be a werewolf anymore.

“I’m gonna kill that moon,” he says, his tone unchanged, and Sirius laughs. The laugh flutters like the wings of a bird taking flight, like Remus’s heart in his chest when Sirius turns on his side to look at him. Luminous, incandescent, resplendent: why does he think these things now, his gaze averted from the sky, the lock of hair falling into Sirius’s eyes the only focal point of his vision. They are alone and they have never really been alone before. Not like this. Not with the castle quiet beneath them, the stars wheeling in perplexing gillyweed-induced shapes above them, and a mere foot of flagstone between them.

“How?” Sirius says, and then, before Remus can parse through his muddled thoughts for some answer, he says, “I’ll kill it with you. It’ll be murder on the oceans, I suppose, and gravity, maybe, but I’ll help you anyway. I’ll destroy the tides with you.”

Remus, the whole of his skin warming in a series of low pulses, his eyes straining through the dark to make out all the perfect shapes of Sirius’s face, had never heard anything so romantic in his life. He was seventeen and he had only slept with one person and them only twice and he already knew, even now, even as stoned as he was, that his life was to be a series of limitations, of second-rate jobs, of relationships cut short before any connection was made between him and the full moon. He looked into Sirius’s eyes and he felt as if his body were a forest full of trees with tangled roots that formed empty hollows all throughout him and Sirius’s gaze was like a hand parting branches, like a beautiful and otherworldly light spilling into the hollows, filling them; and so he reached out, unthinking, and stroked Sirius’s cheek with the backs of his fingers.  
Exquisite, astounding, need: he thinks these things now and knows why. It’s as simple as it is impossible and he lets his hand fall, asking nothing more.

Nothing more except that Sirius destroy the moon.

…

_Azkaban, 1983_

Another night spent watching it through the bars: sky dark as flint, stars glittering in their pale remove, and, there, the moon. White as lightning, white as bone, white as a dead friend’s face where it lies in the rubble of the cottage he owned.

_Promise me, Padfoot. Promise me everything’s going to be okay._

In Azkaban Sirius could always count on someone screaming and breaking the hold disembodied voices had in his head. Day or night someone was screaming or crying, depending on when they slept. Time became unmoored after prolonged exposure to the dementors and the light of the sun seemed to lose its strength when it hit the bars, and yet it seemed that nighttime being the predominant realm of nightmares was too deeply engrained in the human psyche to ever totally shake, and it was nighttime when the other prisoners screamed the most. And all the screaming often kept Sirius awake. He counted the stars to keep himself occupied and every time a dementor passed by he remembered every horrible thing he had done to the people he had loved, and had to start counting all over again.

_One, two, three, I’m innocent, seven, eight, nine, Peter betrayed James, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, Remus is all alone._

Alone and not himself tonight; Sirius could see that the moon was full.

_D’ya hate it?_

What a stupid boy he had been to ask such a painfully obvious question. No matter that he had been high: that was no good excuse. There were never any good excuses for the things he’d done.

Barty Crouch Jr. started screaming five cells down and the dementors gathered in front of his cell to devour his misery, creating a lapse in the usual pattern in which they passed by Sirius’s cell. During the few minutes they stayed away it seemed to Sirius that the light of the moon passed through the bars, rushing over his skin as cool and fresh as alpine water, and he, a man dying of thirst. He remembered that some of the things he had done in his life had been for love, and that some of those things he had actually done well.

He remembered Remus’s face in the pre-dawn gloom, body taut with pleasure, whimpering Sirius’s name. He remembered Remus’s face in firelight, teeth bared in a snarl, voice verging on a howl, his own skin burning all over, a drop of fear mixing in with his desire to make it even headier, the words he wouldn’t speak aloud until years later practically already on his lips: _No one will ever love you the way I love you. Claws and fangs and fur and all. No one will ever even try._ Bite into that skin the way the wolf wants to bite into it, but kiss it better afterwards the way the wolf never can.

Sirius was able to keep these memories and feelings a little while longer after the dementors started to make their rounds again. Perhaps it was because there was a touch of darkness to them. They had come together, after all, because of a murder. It had been a metaphorical murder, but still they had plotted a death.

It had been childish, maybe. A silly attempt to distract Remus from the fact of his transformation. But Sirius had always taken his jokes seriously and he meant to do it if it could be done. Of course, maybe the whole thing had just been an elaborate way to get closer to Remus and maybe make him fall in love with him. It was difficult, especially here, to understand the way his mind had worked at Hogwarts, when everything had been good and promisingly bright. The clear fact was that he had promised Remus that he would help him kill the moon, and damn every dementor in this hell if he hadn’t kept his word and tried.

…

_Hogwarts, 1977-1978_

Remus was taken completely by surprise when, a week after the night in the Astronomy Tower, Sirius told him he had something that might help them kill the moon. He had ordered a book on rockets from the same publisher he had gotten his motorbike books from and together they poured over it in a way that was disturbingly reminiscent of their first year at Hogwarts: sitting on the floor between their beds, legs crossed, book propped on their knees, their heads bent together, their hair occasionally brushing. They spoke with boyish enthusiasm about explosions and detonators, they were boyishly distracted by the phallic shapes of the rockets, drawing human details over the photographs of chromium and steel, and yet Remus had never felt closer to adulthood. The futility of what they were trying to do shadowed every joke and laugh and when they reached the end of the book Sirius actually admitted defeat: something that had never happened before with any other of their pranks or projects.

But then, the next day, Sirius said, in that matter of fact way that always turned out to be a prelude to mayhem or madness or depravity or a combination of the three: “We’ve been going about this the wrong way. We’ve been taking this far too literally.”

“Well, what other way is there to take it?” Remus asked, and three hours later his question was answered as they set fire to a parchment and glue effigy of the moon. Watching fire crumple and blacken the paper face of the moon – which had been painstakingly painted with all the visible craters and blemishes of the real thing – was a far more satisfying experience than Remus would’ve ever believed possible. He laughed and drank from a bottle of firewhiskey that he and Sirius were passing between each other, the blaring of the Muggle rock music Sirius had put on seeming to rise to a crescendo in time with the flame. They were out behind the greenhouses and as part of the paper moon collapsed into itself the smoke from the fire thickened so much that when Remus looked up at it he saw that it was obscuring the true moon. “Yes,” he said when he saw it. His own voice sounded worryingly strange to him – deep and savage – and he could feel Sirius looking at him from across the fire but he still couldn’t stop himself from saying it again. “Yes,” he growled, the word leaving behind a strip of pain at the back of his throat and on his tongue, as if it had dragged something physical along with it. “Yes.”

Sirius shot more sparks at the fire and the paper moon collapsed completely, turned to ash, and the fire rose and more smoke poured forth into the night sky. Another night the sky might have been clearer, the moon might have been fuller, brighter and the smoke wouldn’t have mattered. But tonight the smoke rose thick and dark as a veil and the starlight was obliterated and the moon was smothered and Remus leaned back his head and bared his teeth in a smile while Sirius, next to him, kept on fanning the fire. Remus had never been less aware of his presence; and he had never been more grateful to him.

When they returned to their dormitory in the early hours of the morning Remus had thought that that would be that. They had had their little fun; they had killed the moon. But that night turned out to be the first in a series, and that killing ended up being the first of many.

It was Sirius who kept pursuing this. He went from painting to painting in the halls and pasted crude drawings over any depiction of the moon. He jinxed every astronomy book he could get his hands on so that the word “moon” was replaced with “daft, dead hunk of rock.” He removed the moon from the school’s astrolabes and tore it from all the sky maps. And, after that, he began to edit poetry.

_I’ve tried the new_ and improved chocolate caramels from Honeyduke’s _tilted in the air/Above a hazy tree-and-farmhouse cluster/As you might try a jewel in your hair._

_Lovely_ , Remus had written back, for this had been on a note Sirius had passed him in History of Magic. _Can’t say I recommend eating chocolate via hair, though._

The other poems came at midnight, when they were sitting together on Sirius’s bed with the curtains drawn, no light reaching them but wandlight. The paged through books of Muggle and wizard poetry both, rewriting the improved versions on scraps of parchment, affixing new and strange things to the sky. An overflowing cup of tea rose at nightfall, a Fanged Frisbee set at dawn, and the chrome of a Triumph Bonneville shone its benevolent light across the hills and valleys and sleeping denizens of Britain. Treacle pudding and licorice wands, Weird Sisters albums and the record players they were played on, Dumbledore’s spectacles and McGonagall’s hat: they all took their rightful place in the sky, following the path the moon used to follow, and if they shed light it was a light that never ripped a beast out of human skin, it was a light that Remus could look at any night of the month and stay himself.

They could’ve erased the moon from poetry any time of day – it wasn’t anything they really had to hide – and yet it was always sometime after midnight when they drew together to kill the moon again. They were quiet about it, whispering together in Sirius’s bed, close enough that the words didn’t need much breath to be heard. They weren’t saying anything James and Peter couldn’t be privy to; they could’ve easily asked for their company. But they never did and even though Remus convinced himself that this was just an oversight and that he shouldn’t make too much of it, he could never shake the tryst-like atmosphere of their nightly killings: the low whispers making every word seem soft and precious, the nearness of Sirius’s body, the way Remus could smell the particular scent of his skin. They said things to each other they never repeated in the light of day. They looked deep into each other’s eyes. Remus would return to his bed hot all over, at a point of aching almost past arousal.

_You are not supposed to want your friend_ , he would admonish himself. _You are not supposed to want to push him down onto the bed, pull down his trousers, set about licking his thighs. You are especially not supposed to want_ Sirius _, who everyone wants, who is too distracted by every pretty boy and girl that throws themselves at him to ever notice your scrawny, scarred arse. You are a fool to think about him like this. You are only hurting yourself._

These were his thoughts as he lay awake every night, longing past all reasonable hope. Every night save one in twenty-eight.

The full moon: white and complete as Remus’s pain. Reports say the transformation takes a minute and a half, but there’s no accounting for time in the blinding abyss of agony. Remus has been told he screams and yet to him the event is almost perfectly soundless. He goes to a place where there is no noise or light or smell or taste. First, there is only the pain, and then there is only the wolf and the moon that called it there.

How many times must you kill a lifeless thing before it vanishes into nothingness? What can you do to stop the tilting of the earth, the rising of the moon? Why can he never draw his eyes away from it? Why does it never hurt any less?

If Remus could spare any part of his mind from the pain these were the questions he asked himself. But these questions, like every other piece of him, were swallowed whole by the wolf and when he was free to think of them again they seemed as tattered as he was and remained without answer.

When he transformed back into himself he transformed with his eyes open and he could see the damage he’d done: splintered tables, clawmarks on the walls, shredded sheets, his own blood cooling on the floor. At least, that was what he saw before he started trying to kill the moon. Now, the only thing he saw was Sirius.

It was the only time he ever saw Sirius as anything less than beautiful. He watched Remus transform as a human, his face whey-colored, sweat sticking his hair to his brow and neck, something past pity and sadness in his eyes, something very like rage, but a rage that will never reach its target. (How many times must you kill a lifeless thing?) That rage in Sirius’s eyes is the only thing that makes the fact that he watches the transformation bearable, and when Remus has a voicebox again, and a human tongue, he doesn’t tell him that he shouldn’t have stayed – though he absolutely shouldn’t, especially since he’s not transformed into Padfoot – and he doesn’t tell him to leave. In fact, all he ever manages to say is “thank you.”

“What are you thanking me for?” Sirius asked when they were four months deep into their moon killing, after he had watched Remus transform back into himself four times. (Four times down; the rest of his lifetime to go.) James and Peter had already started back for the castle, and the two of them were alone. They had been alone so often lately that, for Remus at least, it was much too late to go back to the way things had been. He had fallen headfirst into the brilliant chasm that was Sirius’s attention and affection, as had many before him and as would many after him. He was in love with him now and, worse, he knew it, and he could not smother the knowledge or the feeling no matter how many times and how many ways he tried.

But he was proud and protective of that love, the way only someone who lives with unrequited ardor can be, and all he could bring himself to say that day – and for many, many years to come – was, “I think you know why.”

And as it happened, Sirius, whose subtle and inexorable pull was more damning than any moon or star, did indeed.

…

_Azkaban, 1993_

Sirius took Remus up against the wall of an alley once. It was there, as he pulled on his hair and tugged on his earlobe with his teeth that he whispered, “No one will ever love you the way I do.” He meant it halfway between a threat and a vow, like something you could say when you had someone on the other end of your wand, and something you could say at the altar, before the priest and all your friends. “Claws and fangs and fur and all,” he said. “No one will ever even try.”

It had been near the end of the war then, around the time the idea that Remus was the traitor had  
burrowed into Sirius’s mind and started to rot there. He never said a thing about it to anyone else, even as the Order began to falter, even as the threat hanging over James and Lily and their baby started to descend, even as October 31st sped closer and closer. The proof mounted – provided, chiefly, by Peter – and still Sirius did nothing. He was trapped by the most integral and needful part of his own nature and as he lay awake at nights when Remus was out without having accounted for his absence he thought he finally understood what it must be like for Remus to see the full moon rear before him. He would know that to obey the impulse – whether it be to transform and seek innocent flesh or keep silent and invite the destruction of everything beloved – was madness and yet it would be entirely beyond his ability or willpower to stop it. Sirius’s loyalty and love for Remus was woven as deeply into his flesh as a werewolf’s curse. It was impossible for Sirius to give Remus up and lying awake in a half empty bed he saw his love for Remus grow spherical and white, mocking him. Love, he understood then, was so tremendous as to almost be separate from him. It hung above him, illuminating him, and yet for all its vitality it was lifeless, more a part of the airless firmament than the breathing earth.

Some nights he had clutched at his chest at the thought of this thing within him – without blood, without breath, without end – poised to deliver him unimaginable destruction, or unimaginable bliss. Could never figure out how to kill the moon, could never figure out how to kill love. On these nights, in late September, clouds scudded through the sky all night and if Sirius looked out the window he would see the stars and moon half peeking out from behind them, like gods trying to hide their mocking smiles at his futility.

Such melodrama in those nights, Sirius thinks now in his cell. So many problems so easily righted. (Take Remus’s head in hand, feel the stubble on his cheek, see the tired circles below his eyes. Hold him still long enough so that he shudders, leans forward, gives himself away. “I’ve been having terrible thoughts lately,” he’d say. “I keep thinking you’re the traitor.” Exclamation of surprise: “No, _you_ are!” Put two and two together, or subtract one from four, whatever the method the answer is clear: Peter. Give Peter to Dumbledore, give James and Lily long enough to live beyond twenty-one. Dumbledore kills Voldemort and the future cracks open wide: anywhere, anything, and we’ll be together.)

The dementors drank deep of his regret. Let them. Plenty more where that came from. He’s never going to run dry.

There were clouds in the sky all night and Sirius could no longer sleep without seeing starlight. At dawn he curled up on the floor, turned into Padfoot, and from this canine remove he could examine some of his nicer memories in fact if not in feeling. Bitter cold night. Restlessness leading to revelation. Sneaking across the dorm. Climbing into Remus’s bed. Seeing the surprise on Remus’s face, and being surprised by that surprise. How could he not see how much Sirius had fallen in love with him? Sirius had felt it bursting from every pore. He wanted to prove it to Remus in a way that could not be denied. And then he did.

He tucked himself into a tight ball, nose to tail, and tried to conserve a little bit of warmth from that memory. It ought not to work, not here, but twenty minutes later when Minister Fudge stopped outside his cell Sirius stood across from him feeling saner than he had in years.

…

_Hogwarts, 1978_

It happened late at night, the way the most significant things in Remus’s life always did. It was a week after the fourth full moon that Sirius had watched him transform: late February, the cold splintering through any exposed skin, the areas around the fireplaces too crowded to move, the nights long enough to lose all sense of direction within them. Remus wrapped himself in two blankets and a warming charm, and none of it was any good against the cold.

He huddled in his bed, too cold to sleep, midnight sneaking past him and the dark hours of the morning bearing down upon him. He blinked rapidly in the dark, his overtired mind telling him that if he didn’t the fluid in his eyes would freeze. The cold was so all encompassing that it was almost half a minute before Remus realized that Sirius had climbed into bed with him.

At first, Remus thought he was dreaming. He had had so many daydreams that started just like this. In his fantasies there was always some excuse – Charms homework he wanted done, a quill he needed to borrow – and when the thinness of the excuse broke open then would come the ecstasy. But the reality, as sometimes happens, turned out to be much simpler.

“I had a thought,” Sirius said, another typical prelude to mayhem. “Or, I guess you could say I had a thought about thoughts. They’re all we’re made up of, aren’t they? I think, therefore I am. I know I’m a handsome rogue, therefore I am. But if I stop thinking that, even just for a second, do I stop being a handsome rogue?”

“Have you gotten more gillyweed off Fletcher?” Remus asked, his voice muffled by the blankets. “Because, you know, it’s impolite not to share.”

Sirius acknowledged this comment with only a brief – perfect, beautiful – smile and then went on. “So if you could forget something else, something outside of you – say, the moon – wouldn’t it cease to be for however long you can forget about it?”

“A philosophical death?” Remus said, voice still muffled, most of him still buried beneath the blankets and thank Merlin for that because one of Sirius’s thighs was leaning against his and the cold was becoming less and less of an issue. “How would that even work?”

“I’d have to make you forget the moon.”

Remus snorted. “You’re not trying out a Memory Charm on me.”

Sirius shifted on the bed. “No,” he said, grinning devilishly, “I was thinking we ought to try something that requires a different kind of wand work.” He laid his palm across Remus’s forehead, the only part of him exposed to the cold, and Remus had to stifle a gasp at the warmth of his skin.

“How are you so warm?”

Remus had pulled the blankets from his lips to speak, and Sirius moved towards him in an eclipse-like motion, slowly and steadily blotting out everything in sight until he was all that remained to be seen.

His voice purled through the dark and cold, soft and sweet and full of need: “That’s all thanks to you.” It was only then that Remus caught the joke Sirius had made earlier, and it was only then that he realized what Sirius’s new plan to kill the moon was.

“You’re mental,” he said, his voice faint. Sirius was pulling back the covers to get in with him.

“This’ll work,” Sirius said. “And if it doesn’t…” He paused, one hand on Remus’s hip, the other sliding slowly beneath his pajama top. “I think it’ll still be worth our time.”

Remus gaped at him, disbelieving, and Sirius sighed. “Say no or say nothing and I’ll leave.”

That snapped Remus back to reality and he struggled to clear his throat. “Well,” he croaked, “so long as you’re here…”

Sirius grinned his maddest grin, and slipped one of his thighs between Remus’s.

Remus touched the depths of his own hunger one night in every twenty-eight, and he had thought he knew its limits, but that was before Sirius loomed directly over him, hair dark as nightfall, eyes gray as starlight, and pulled his shirt over his head and Remus realized that he was no longer cold, and that he could no longer really remember what being cold meant. It seemed to him at that moment that there was a lot he couldn’t remember and images flitted through his mind without finding resonance – books, quills, broomsticks. All he remembered was here, staring down at him, sending minute shudders through his body, the precursors for any transformation. But this went deeper than bone breaks and wracking spasms, because there would never come any point when he would lose himself to the change. He was lucid and in control when he crushed his lips to Sirius’s, when he pulled Sirius’s pajama bottoms off him – cold be damned – so that he could run his hands up and down the smoothness of Sirius’s skin, when he buried his head between Sirius’s thighs, sucking, licking, reveling in every twitch and groan, almost hoping the noise would wake the others, almost wanting them to see the look on Sirius’s face so that in the morning they could confirm he hadn’t been dreaming it.

He was slightly less lucid when he was the one unclothed and writhing, back arching up off the bed to sink himself deeper into the exquisite wet heat of Sirius’s mouth. He lost whole categories of words and memories while he moaned, but he was never not aware of the fact that though this was the antithesis of the full moon’s light it was a very similar experience. His body moved seemingly of its own accord and he begged in whimpers the whole way through, anticipating the ending, when a single instance of time and sensation would wipe him clean from himself. He was almost afraid after he came that he’d open his eyes and find the furniture destroyed and Sirius in tatters, but what he saw instead was Sirius’s eyes and nose and reddened mouth. And yet, somehow, it still felt like some damage had been done.

He will, only a few years from now, think of Sirius as a murderer. He will review every moment they were ever together, trying to figure out when Sirius changed, trying to understand how he couldn’t see it. He will think of Sirius in shadow, his desire to see Remus transform, his acknowledgment and courting of Remus’s nature before and during the war and wonder if it was _him_ , if he had been the thing to turn Sirius towards the Dark Arts. He will be unable to forget this night, first of so many, and remember how Sirius had let him hold him down and bite him, hard. He will never be able to forget the way that felt. And though the boy who came into his bed that night and the man they took to Azkaban seemed to have only a passing resemblance in common, nothing, not even the fact of James and Lily and Peter’s deaths, could make Remus stop loving him. It would’ve been easier by far to kill the moon.

Because that had happened, once, that night, when Sirius kissed his brow before he left and Remus lay awake and still for hours, as though pinioned by that kiss. The hangings around the bed hadn’t been closed completely and Remus could see straight through to the window, where the moon, waning and half full, swept across the sky. He stared at it, uncomprehending of its significance, hardly aware of its light, not really seeing it all because, just then, all he could see, all he could feel, and all he knew was love for Sirius.

…

_Azkaban, 1993_

Six plates of colorless, barely edible food are stacked near the bars of his cell and three dementors are gathered just beyond the bars. They can feel him weakening and they do not want to miss his death. A prisoner’s last scream is sweetest; they will glut themselves on it. When the moment comes there will be so many of them gathered around his cell that he will run through empty halls and exit past an unguarded door when he escapes. He tries to focus on this image, but when he thinks of himself getting past the door it’s not the sea he pictures but a vast stretch of black velvet that has been cracked and warped with age and shows some glittering substance beneath.

It’s minutes before he realizes that what he is imagining himself jumping into is actually the sky as it appears outside his window. He inhales deeply and can feel the emptiness in his stomach contracting in on itself. He had prepared for the physical pain of starvation but had been taken wholly off-guard by the way his mind started to slip and lose focus. If he had considered it beforehand, it might have frightened him since he would’ve assumed that with the presence of the dementors around him any sort of hallucination would only be one of his worst memories made to seem even realer than they already did. In reality, his thoughts just looped in lazy circles around each other and he became certain of absurdities: it was the closest to being high that he had come in thirteen years.

In this state he considered everything that passed before his eyes with a childlike, unerring scrutiny. The tips of his fingers hold his attention for hours and one particular brick in his cell, which is slightly smaller than the rest, forces him into a contemplation of the underlying matter of the universe. But because he is lying on his cot and because it is his habit to look out the window while he does so, it is the moon he contemplates the most.

One night he saw the moon as a gaping mouth with himself inside it, clenched between the teeth. And what familiar teeth! One of the canines slightly crooked, the rest remarkably white and even. Sirius touches his neck and his ears to where those teeth had bitten him so many times during lovemaking. He stares at the moon-mouth, feeling bite marks on his skin, seeing himself between teeth, while another part of him calculates from the phase of the moon that he’s been fasting for three days and should probably only fast for two more, and both thoughts seem equally valid and real.

The next night he is able to consider the practicalities of his escape in his mind, while in his eyes he sees the moon grow a tail and become Moony. It had seemed inevitable that this would happen, just as it was inevitable that every night the dementors would bring bad dreams. Moony peers in through the bars of the window and in his eyes Sirius sees nothing but accusation. As if for the first time, Sirius remembers that Remus is alone, that he was abandoned to the moonlight, and just as if it were the first time this thought cuts so deeply that Sirius exhales in pain, for he knows that this is just the first of his sins against Remus. And Remus, good-natured and so lovely, had never done anything to Sirius but to ask him to kill the moon. Which, really, had just been him asking Sirius to distract him from pain.

And what had Sirius given him in reply? Twelve years of it.

Moony, silver-bright, his eyes studded with starlight, leans in through the bars and holds his open mouth over Sirius’s head. Sharp, numerous teeth advance on him and Sirius, another part of him still thinking that he must escape tomorrow, does the sensible thing and faints.

When he wakes it’s sixteen hours later and his head has cleared. He looks out the window and sees nothing but sky. The sun is beginning its long descent and even longer twilight and once the sky goes black it’ll be time to go.

Dementors are pressing against the bars of his cell, drawing in needy, hungry breaths. There was a joke waiting to be made at their expense, something that complimented his virility or desirability, but he couldn’t find the strength to string the words together. He was afraid. Not of the dementors, or the long open water between the island and the mainland, or the threat of recapture, or even the thought that Peter might elude him. There were people out there that he’d failed and he was afraid to face them again. How to face Harry, half-grown, an orphan because of an idiot decision he had made? How to face Remus, after all these years, after all these nights apart, after so much pain?

_You didn’t sell your friends to Voldemort but you got them killed anyway. Might as well call you traitor. It fits so well with all your other accomplishments: betrayer, abandoner, liar. You promised everyone it would be alright, you promised Remus you would be there for every moon, and look how fast, how easy it was to break your word. What good are you to anyone? You’ll never catch the rat, you’ll never be able to keep anyone safe. Might as well just stay here. This cell is where you belong. It’s what you’ve earned and it’s just what you deserve._

The voice Sirius hears speaking these words is strange to him. It takes him a moment to realize that this voice was not in his head, that he had been talking to himself.

He lets out a strangled sob. There are more dementors standing outside his cell than he’s ever seen in one place before. It’s so cold in his cell that he’s shaking, and outside the sun has just slipped below the horizon.

There’s movement in the back of the crowd of dementors. One of them is coming forward to open his cell and bring him dinner. When he doesn’t try to eat they will descend and drain away the last shred of life that sticks to his skin.

Sirius waits and watches, his head lolling back against the wall of the cell. At first it is difficult to see the dementors part to let the one with the plate through, but little by little the sight of them becomes clearer, as Sirius’s cell begins to fill with cool, white light.

He doesn’t turn to look out the window, and when the dementor puts the key in the lock he doesn’t brace himself or weigh his options. In the end, he does what he has always done – for better or worse – and acts without thinking.

The door creaks open, the full moon rises, and Sirius transforms.

He is past them – a rush of horrible cold seeping through fur and bone – before he can even consider what he has done. He hears them shuffling, confused, and he has already made it down two flights of stairs and is barreling so fast towards the door that it lets out a noise like a thunderclap when he barrels into it. The door is unlocked – who would dare try to escape? – and then there’s nothing separating him from freedom but ocean.

The water is icy and rough. The waves sink into his fur and try to drag him into the depths. It is so cold he can see his breath every time he gasps for air. It is so cold he is primarily propelled forward by his shivering and shaking. It is paradise and practically tropical and infinitely warmer than Azkaban.

He swims whichever way the waves allow and for minutes at a stretch he loses all bearing of where he is. But always, above him, is the moon, and tonight, as it hurts Remus it lights Sirius’s way, and it is with its pale, white light that he first sees the shore.

The waves thrust him upon the sand and his magic fails him and he transforms, coughing and cursing, back into a man. Now is the most critical time: he must run as far and as fast as he can before the Aurors descend and his picture appears in the _Daily Prophet_. He knows he has to drag himself to his feet, transform, get off this beach, run and keep on running, but for the moment he stays perfectly still, the waves lapping at his feet and the moonlight shining on the crown of his head. For the first time in twelve years there isn’t a single dementor within a thousand yards of him.

He smiles, old memories – all of them good and precious and up until this very moment forgotten – jostling around his mind. He looks up at the moon and remembers nights when it was waning and he had held Remus in his arms and kissed his bruises and licked his jaw and cuddled him till he faded into sleep and loved him so much that the fact of it could never leave him, could never be killed, no matter what hell he descended into. Looking skyward he felt warm and safe, though tonight his arms were empty. And for a moment longer he watched the moon as it began to set, round and small and nothing more really than a parcel of light, and though he knew that he would never be able to get rid of it he knew that he would soon be there to kiss away whatever pain it might bring.

But first, he had the small matter of a rat to attend to.

Sirius Black, hours away from infamy, transformed into a giant black dog and ran from the beach into the nearby trees, where common wolves were returning from the hunt. Many miles away, Remus Lupin, soon to learn of said infamy, transformed with a gasp back into a man and felt a lingering, wolfish sense of joy, as if he had successfully taken down some large prey, or as if he had scented, faint but sure on the breeze, the return of an old packmate. And though their days began quite differently, with one running for his freedom in a forest and the other making tea in a shabby kitchen, they were both of them thinking distant thoughts of each other as they moved beneath the sky, just now lightening, that had always bound them together.


End file.
